Neuroscience

The study of the nervous system of spiders has long been one of the central problems of natural science. The birth of studying the spider central nervous system is dated back to 1890, the year that the brilliant work of Saint Remy laid its foundations. His work described the central nervous system of the labidognath family of spiders (Remy 1890). Moreover, in the 1920s, Hanström applied the Golgi staining technique to study the spider brain. He noticed that spider visual neuropils varied greatly in size and organization (Hanström 1921). Furthermore, Hanström claimed that the spider brain and insect brain have shared neural structures. This idea of brain homology can still be found in current literature today (Babu 1965, Bullock and Horridge 1965, Firstman 1954, Legendre 1959). In addition, Legendre has given a comprehensive study of the brain morphology and development of spiders (Legendre 1965). However, early 20th century researchers, such as SaintRemy, Hanström, and Legendre were limited by techniques and sample quality (Long 2019).